Free Hero by Paul Butler

keep the sadness from my smile. “How like him!” I said.
    Mr. Jenson seemed reassured, and smiled fully for the first time.
    A hint of sunlight seeps through the cloud and picks out moles of lichen on the skin of a tilted headstone. The roll and sizzle of the tide become clearer. Patience . A voice comes to me unbidden, and I weigh the word. Yesterday in the car, last night weeping on my shoulder, today gone. This is the tide I must patiently obey. It is the struggle to which I last night committed myself afresh. Patience is woman’s valour; when the gunfire ceases, our battle begins.
    The thought calms me, makes me feel connected to something greater than myself. I watch a swallow dip, rise, and dive past the cliff ridge and I know I must hunker down for the wait.
    Something skitters against the windowpane. I’ve no idea of the time, but it feels like deepest night. Fold upon fold of silence has enwrapped me for hours while I have moved in and out of sleep. Some vague image, half-shroud, half-bedsheet, has pursued me through my dreams, sometimes flapping before my face as I turn a corner of the street, sometimes following me along the beach, its corners rippling like monstrous wings. Is Charles wrapped in a shroud? I wonder. Mother and I were not allowed to view the body, of course. The dead return in coffins nailed shut and sealed tight with cork.
    The noise from the window has pulled me through the razor-thin borderline to wakefulness, and watching the darkness above my bed, I consider the noise. Leaves and sand can tap upon the glass when the wind is up, but this is different. Hardly a breeze is present tonight, and the matter cast against the surface seems more substantial, like a scattering of missiles rather than some random act of the wind. I think of Simon, and my sinews stretch in hope. I think of getting up to see. The sound comes again, louder than before. This time a pebble lodges upon the outer sill before falling. I hear its muffled descent through layers of creeping ivy, the only plant to have entirely kept its leaves.
    I rise swiftly and, almost in a single movement, reach the window. How strange it is that darkness makes me a creature of grace; in daytime, my tread is heavy and I am rather clumsy of limb.
    I draw back the curtain. Its runners chatter like far away geese, then go silent as I peer through the pane into the garden. Beyond the dark trees, clouds swell like mercury. The moon is hidden, but a faint luminous glow spreads over the lawn, delineating each expected shape—the stump of the oak that splintered and died in the high winds of 1911, the ash tree that demarcated the eastern limit of our garden, the pond-side boulder that Charles and I always imagined to be the one from which the valiant knight of the storybook prized his sword—and one irregularity. Standing very close to the boulder is a man. I fix my eyes upon this form, mapping his shoulders, scrutinizing his stance, until I am sure. Then—illogically as he surely cannot see into the darkened room—I wave.
    As quickly as I can, I step into slippers and wrap myself in a gown. The brass knob makes a clanking sound, as it always does, when I open the bedroom door, but when I run across the landing and down the stairs, my own tread miraculously keeps its softness. I go through the scullery, which is cold. The key to the back door is always kept in the lock so I merely have to turn it; my stomach heaves as I do so. I find myself slowing down as the door opens inwards, admitting the crisp, still air.
    Dew seeps through my slippers as I race, still huddled in my gown, towards Simon. Despite the missile he has thrown at my window, he does not approach me. A tingle of irritation, and perhaps fear, nibbles at my shoulders as I draw closer to him.
    A faint blue light catches his eyes. My neck sinks into my dressing gown, needing its warmth.
    â€œYou’ve come back.”
    â€œI’ve been at the tannery.”